


The Waste Land

by wreathed



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Chess, Developing Relationship, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Non-Chronological, Sex, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 18:24:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1397956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathed/pseuds/wreathed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My friend, blood shaking my heart / The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract<br/>- <i>The Waste Land</i>, T. S. Eliot</p><p>Erik and Charles, from beginning to end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Waste Land

**Author's Note:**

> Written before the release of _X-Men: Days of Future Past_.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

Schmidt had told him to fear all death: by earth, air, fire or water. 

(Metal was not an element in Shaw’s mythology, but it is in Erik Lehnsherr’s.) 

A fraud by name, was Shaw-Schmidt, and he did have mutant powers, but hardly of the fortune-telling kind. He had not thought anyone would save Erik. He had not factored in Charles Xavier.

* 

That there is only one death is a great relief, mutations or no, but Armando’s is still one too many. Charles took him away from his perfectly ordinary life, and it seems to bring upon him a grief he cannot shake.

“It was not a safe life,” Erik tells him. “No-one is safe anymore, wherever they are. You were not at fault.”

There is no body left to bury, only dust, but this they bury quickly, within the CIA base’s borders but as far away from the main buildings as they can manage.

Raven suggests resting flowers atop the newly-dug topsoil, for that is what is normally done, and she is not even someone who is typically loyal to convention. 

Charles uses some trick of telepathy to leave the compound, and returns a short while later with a funeral arrangement from a florists. It is raining.

“Join me?” he asks Erik when on his way through the building, his arms full of colors and his hair enchantingly damp and curling against his neck and forehead. Erik obliges him.

“They’re hyacinths. Do you know why hyacinths are associated with mourning?” (Used to being the cleverest man in the room, Charles doesn’t wait for an answer.) “Apollo was throwing the discus with Hyacinthus, his lover. But Apollo accidentally struck Hyacinthus with the disc and Hyacinthus died. Despite his powers, Apollo couldn’t save him. Greek gods were made so fallible.” Then Charles smirks, as though he has made a terribly amusing joke. “I tell it as if it really happened. He’s a god. It’s just a story.”

They walk out to the grave together. Erik can smell on Charles the fresh, earthy scent of the heavy rain, the sweet smell of flowers meant for a dead man.

The cold is turning Charles’s lips redder. Erik wants to– 

Learning to move metal has taught Erik how to train his mind to focus on a single thing. Pursuing Schmidt so single-mindedly has taught him all about how to forget things he did not need or want to think about.

Charles can read minds.

Erik wants to–

*

Charles wonders how much longer Erik will stay in Richmond. He has invited him to his plain CIA-assigned bedroom for tea. He does not want Erik to think he sees him in the same way as he sees Alex, Sean and the others; the kids. He has found that he wishes to spend as much of his time with Erik as possible, and not merely for the purpose of getting Erik to trust him.

Charles begins to tell Erik about his childhood, the model airplanes, the toy chemistry set, until he stops, remembering all that he had as a child and all that Erik has lost. (Sometimes – _ha ha_ , he thinks – he wishes he could understand people better.)

“They said we were not real Germans,” Erik says, interpreting Charles’s silence. “But I remember, every year, we used to holiday by the _Starnberger See_ , just the same as as many others. I was very young the first time we went up into the mountains, and I was scared by how steep it was. But mama pushed me down the snow on a sled and told me all I needed to do was hold on tight. It was a very uncomplicated, easily resolved fear. I was happy.”

It is the most Charles has learned from Erik, so far, about his early childhood.

“It sounds wonderful, Erik.” Charles does his best to make such experiences sound transcendent, as if certain moments mean that nothing else matters.

“It was. Goethe wrote atop the _Kickelhahn_ … let’s see if I can remember. _Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch_. That it is calm in the mountains, essentially. It is more lyrical than that, of course.”

(Charles notes in the back of his mind to look it up later; he does not agree with Erik in this instance that only the most basic of meanings are necessary.)

“It was a long time ago,” Erik says. “Now, shorter skirts are coming in and everyone’s obsessed with pop music. It makes me feel–”

“Old?” Charles ventures, with a boyish grin that makes Erik feel older still. “We aren’t, and we mustn’t act as if we are. The relentless nature of your goal has exhausted you. But we must be friends to our students, as well as to any potential ones. Our culture has become divided, isolationist, scared. War made it that way, I suppose. Nobody wants to listen to one another.”

“It’s humans that are like that, not us,” Erik says. “We do not belong in this world, how it currently is. It is deadly to us. It is not ours.”

Charles next words are urgent, earnest in a tone that he knows Erik may find arrogant or painful. “What will come of this, I do not know exactly.” Charles says. “But, Erik, I will do my best to show you something different to what you have known. And you deserve – perhaps we even both deserve – a friend, and an equal at that.”

*

Even though it is an igniting of the Cold War that they have diverted together, apart, Charles must rebuild as if there has been a real battle after all. (Sand shifts underneath him.)

It is particularly difficult for Charles to see Erik as he is now – his mind inaccessible, disappearing with his sister in an eye’s blink – because he cannot help but compare Erik to how he could have been. He not would feel this tight pain in his chest (and no pain in his legs), he is sure of it, if more people before him had seen in Erik the good.

The world has not ended; missile upon missile are no longer held suspended in midair. What has ended is a world of possibilities. For a cause – not even for a cause, for a fundamental disagreement as to how a cause should be fought – Erik has resolutely chosen his side.

And, despite it all, Charles wants them to meet again – on a bridge, he imagines, across the newly-formed river that divides them – and, even though Erik has show him that nothing is enough to make him stay, for them to embrace and kiss. In that moment no-one else will matter (no; Charles is too compassionate for no-one else to matter).

And, despite it all, Charles still wants Erik, even far away, to somehow seek so single-mindedly that he does succeed in finding his redemption.

 

II. A GAME OF CHESS

Charles is sitting in his bedroom’s grandest armchair like he belongs there as they face each other, sliding pieces across the board and talking. The ornate ceiling covers them, the busy wallpaper presses them in. There is Charles’s antique brass bed, an unlit golden-colored candelabra, mirrors. How, Erik thinks, can Charles be at home in such a mansion.

Charles promises, _promises_ , with that prim warm _you want to fuck me right now don’t you_ voice of his that he’ll never read Erik’s mind when they’re playing (although Erik thinks Charles is all too good at reading other people’s strategies anyway, and doesn’t know how he’ll ever manage to chalk up a greater number of victories).

So Erik takes those opportunities to think about new ways to win their games, and what to make Charles do upon his success, as if that’s the way their bargains work anyway.

“It’s far too much of an unfair advantage,” Erik points out. “We’d have to buy a brass set for you to even see evidence of my mutation, and even then it wouldn’t improve my game.”

Charles sighs. “You are your own person, entitled to your privacy. I wouldn’t want to desecrate you.” 

_I would let you desecrate me any way you chose,_ Erik thinks offhandedly, his thoughts lying joyously untruncated in the absence of anyone’s hand placed to their temple.

 _I won’t stop you leaving. I could, but I won’t._ To be blunt, he could never understand that polite stepping-back aspect of Charles. What’s the point of holding back on any method as long as your intentions are right? If your enemies will stoop to anything, so should you. The variation of mutations meant battles were uneven now. So be it.

“I _could_ take over your mind and make you think I’d won,” says Charles. “Or control your body and lead you to Fool’s Mate every time. But playing against yourself’s no fun.”

“It almost sounds as if you crave adversaries,” Erik says, carefully. “Worthy ones.”

“I enjoy your company,” Charles tells him, as if his bluff has been called, and his blue eyes blink, once.

They play in silence until Erik wins, picking up Charles’s remaining bishop with nimble fingers (he imagines his fingers in Charles’s hair) and executing a sly slide of his rook that Charles can’t have seen coming (he imagines pinning Charles against the gilded wall).

“Congratulations,” says Charles.

“You don’t have to talk to me out loud anymore, you know,” Erik says. “I’ve won.”

Charles raises his eyebrows. “Would you really let… I mean, it’s like holding back a part of myself. But I don’t normally do it unless I need to because, you know, it tends to scare people. Even other mutants.”

“Charles,” Erik says. “I accept you completely, as you are.”

“And I you,” Charles replies, in that noble earnest way of his that Erik could never entirely endorse; it sings with a purity he longs to borrow or defile.

“Read my mind,” Erik says suddenly. He will not be able to censor himself around Charles much longer, and, spur-of-the-moment, he wants to know whether Charles’s statement can truly hold water. 

“You don’t want that. Not really. It’s alright, Erik. I know you’re used to being alone.”

Erik grabs Charles’s wrist – he doesn’t really think it through, but Charles always thinks he’s so damned right you need to do something to make him _listen_. “Do it.”

Erik thinks of Charles’s boyish smile and chess tactics and _mutations make battles unequal; so be it_ and his fingers curling in Charles’s hair and canting his hips against Charles’s and pushing him back onto his magnificent bed and–

The sharp intake of breath Charles gives is glorious (and yes, that is a dark flush rising in his cheeks).

(Then Charles lets Erik see something of his own, a memory: he is an undergraduate at Oxford and he is making his way to chapel the morning after his first time having sex with a man (Daniel: older, long eyelashes, had spun a line about wanting to show Charles what he had been missing).

Two women pass him on the street. “What you get married for,” one says to the other “if you don’t want children?”)

Erik starts to think about the handful of times he’s met boys in places difficult to find if you don’t know where to go. The danger of it, and the guilt he felt afterwards, the same guilt he feels over doing anything that distracts him from Shaw. He starts to think about it more, letting Charles catch a glimpse of someone Erik once knew sinking to his knees, and then he stops.

“This argument is immaterial,” Erik says aloud. Then Charles kisses him.

They start to undress themselves (it is quicker than undressing each other), pants and underwear off but shirts still hanging on by a few buttons, and Erik experiences Charles’s mind within his – never controlling (still, in a way, holding back), just being close to him; another kind of caress.

“I don’t just prefer it,” murmurs Erik in Charles’s ear. “I find your voice inside my head maddeningly sexy.” He rakes his eyes over Charles’s pale, freckled skin (his blush has spread down to his chest), the strong curve of his thighs, his erection jutting out between his shirttails.

“This is the strangest seduction I have ever had any part in,” Charles smiles.

“Mere seduction no longer, unless you just want to lie beside each other and _think_ about it–“

“There are no laws against that,” Charles reminds him, suddenly serious. And Erik starts thinking _there will be soon, everyone’ll find out what we can do and lock us up and–_ but he manages to push the thought aside.

*

They don’t use the bed, they use the wall. It’s Erik up against it rather than Charles – that’s Charles bloody well showing off his powers once he gets the chance, Erik thinks, because he won’t give Erik exactly what he wants, just what he needs – but Erik doesn’t especially mind when Charles spreads Erik’s legs apart, grunts, drives into him, grabs his shirt, fills him from the inside.

He sees themselves in all of Charles’s mirrors.

*

“I only get to see what you choose to project into my mind,” Erik says, tracing abstract patterns on Charles’s wrist (they’re in the bed now). “But you already know everything about me.”

“Mutations make battles unequal. So be it,” Charles says quietly, and yes, it is disconcerting to hear his own thoughts spoken back to him and yet Erik also feels relief: he can be completely himself around Charles, even if it’s because he has no other choice.

“You began to drown. And I jumped into the water… Do you remember?”

“I remember.” How could Charles even consider that he did not remember? Never, not when Charles had looked so young and _new_ …

“Then are you alive, or not? Evolution does less harm than good. It was your mutation that almost killed you, and it was mine that saved you.”

“It was you that saved me, Charles,” says Erik. “Not your mutation.”

There is a great big world outside this bed.

“We can’t let this become a distraction,” Erik says. “What shall we do if we are attacked again? Before we are ready? What shall we do?”

Charles kisses him, benevolent and promising.

“We know tomorrow will be a day of training, and then you and I will play chess in the evening. Anything else cannot be planned for. Now, sleep.”

*

“Goodnight,” Charles says to everyone, weeks later, the evening before they go to meet the great big fleets of ships, and when Charles and Erik awaken they wear the suits Hank has left them and then hurry up please, it’s time to find out if you are ready for this.

 

III. THE FIRE SERMON

Deep in the extensive gardens and grounds of Xavier’s school, there is a slim, torrid stream, hidden from the house by distance and spreading sugar maples.

It feels seedy to fuck there, in the dark and in the fog, but they often do – they can be as loud as they like here, away from the house Charles has filled with people.

Erik had thought that clean and pampered Charles would object to his bare ass on the wet earth of the bank, but Charles has proved Erik wrong.

“See, you can be colloquial,” Erik says. _I like it when you are for me_ he thinks, knowing Charles will probably hear him.

“I’m hardly _stuffy_ ,” Charles protests (looking _filthy ridiculous gorgeous_ on the ground).

“Sure, _professor_.”

“If my nine year-old self could see me… My old tree house is still just about standing, further upstream. Father asked the gardener to construct it in the hope that I would run around outside and grow tall and strong. I think I ended up bringing my favorite books down and setting it up as a room of quiet study.”

Erik laughs and thinks _how have you come to mean so much_. People should never miss him, that’s one of the many rules he has set himself. At any point, he should be able to slip away alone, and if anyone notices it should not be to the point of wishing that he would return.

*

Erik once sat by _Lac Leman_ , alone on the shore under the light of the late-night moon. It was not long after his search had taken him to Geneva, and his tears fell silently down the edge of a clenched jaw. He remembered rats, and bodies naked on the low damp ground, and worse. Just for a short while, it did not even make him determined to avenge. It made him want to slip peacefully into the water and fall to the very bottom.

(Just now and again stillness gets the better of him and draws him in.)

The next day, he learned of Villa Gesell and was on the move again.

*

It is dusk, many many moons on. Mechanics play out after dinner together, every other Friday.

“Well now that’s done,” Mystique tells her lover, brown hair growing longer and turning to flame, blue face staring back at him via the small mirror on her nightstand. Both are here sacrificing love for love, minds thankfully separate at all times; his touch is not unwelcome, he can tell, and he knows she’s too strong for him to break her heart.

Magneto dresses and leaves, and he hears through the door her putting on a modern record he does not recognize.

*

And, long ago, Charles and Erik are still on the bank of a Westchester brook. 

They find the remains of the tree house and fuck again, making an ignoble world joyous for themselves in a way that Charles thinks selfish but Erik does not. They connect with each other, and can connect nothing else with nothing else. Not an army yet, nor enemies. Anyone could sneak up behind them and kill them.

(Armando, gone and not thought of in this moment, despite the flowers. An invasion of a CIA base and a mutant power not strong enough. Burning burning burning burning. Shaw in a prison of his own making

burning

or else buried, strangled, drowned. Or killed some other way. But Erik does not think of this now.)

 

IV. DEATH BY WATER

 _You can’t. You’ll drown,_ the man says without moving his lips.

 _Your drowning will not stop them,_ the man means. _It doesn’t matter what temperament or religion you hold, what kind of man you are, you will die. All you will do is die._

And in that moment the man had looked so young and _new_ , entering Erik’s life fully-formed and already knowing his name, passionate plea coming from deep inside his head. And Erik had felt so old, exhausted, half-blinded by the sting of the sea, and overwhelmed by the idea that he might never have to be alone again.

Erik allows himself be carried up to where the waves break, breathes in sharp for starved lungs, gasping; renewed. The sound of water crashes away. He asks the man for his name.

A sea-change. This is the part that matters.

 

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

In the future, there is an unholy war.

*

Charles is pacing around the room.

“This has distracted us. We have responsibilities. We need to give no reason for anyone to believe that we shouldn’t be trusted.”

His childhood bedroom, model airplanes, the night before they take to the skies to save the world. Charles turns to face Erik, exciting beautiful Erik who he thinks may have lost his way and Charles does not want to be the cause if he cannot be the cure. 

“We’re mutants,” Erik replies. “We are breaking natural law already. What’s a common one? We are prototypes for a new mankind.”

“We would be arrogant to assume we are the first, I think,” Charles says quietly.

(He cannot, in that moment, quite say everything that he wants to, say everything that Erik is right and wrong about, voice fears he is supposed to be above (he considers himself vaguely Anglican although, above all, a scientist) – _I was taught that when God found man to be alone, he did not create a second man_.)

He settles for looking into Erik’s eyes and saying, “There is no-one else in the world I care about more than you. My friend, blood shook my heart when I kissed you for the first time.” The daring of that’s moment’s surrender. Would he truly have to give it up now?

Erik, for a moment, smiles. “That doesn’t get in the way of offering your students hope. And nothing can bring them peace. Peace only comes with dying, I’ve been persuaded to believe.”

When did it become Erik convincing him?

Afraid, Charles relapses to scholar. “Peace comes with an untethering… as the Eastern religions have it, only when you let go of all desire, and thus suffering, will you progress to complete enlightenment. Few achieve it. To let go of everything like that, it is almost to be more–”

“More than human?”

Give. Sympathize. Control. Charles sometimes thinks he doesn’t quite utilize the third often enough. 

This is their bridge, over the river in the middle of a fallen city, and they are both to choose which direction to take.

“Erik, remember. The better man. There is the man you will become to consider, if you step into the other side’s refining fire.” It is deliberate, how Charles speaks of him as if he was a third, separate being, wrenching apart the two of them, although Charles knows that part of Erik has been there for far longer than Charles has known him.

“For a while now,” Erik says. “You’ve not once strayed inside my head.”

“I am worried that I might not understand you. I am worried as to what I might find there.”

The last embers die in the grate behind them as they realize what it is they have to choose.

“We should get some sleep,” says Erik, and god this is not what Charles wanted to return to, to be met with that unyielding jawline, that expression of constant warring with the world.

They remained clothed and close their eyes, conclusion just out of reach. Charles feels his heart beat, worrying about what tomorrow will bring.

“Charles,” Erik murmurs.

“Yes?” Charles says, eyes still closed.

“There is a lot I cannot promise you.”

*

Dawn spreads over them through the open curtains; a violet light.

Charles wakes, reaches out to Erik with a hand to his temple and Erik, groggily, deliberately starts thinking nonsense in a confusing jumble of German and French and a third language that Charles does not know.

“Erik. Trust me. Please. At least in this.”

Erik sits up, nods his assent to Charles exercising his power. Then, wordlessly, quick as he ever was, he moves so that he is on top of Charles, not letting him go, and the house is so early-morning quiet Charles doesn’t want to say another word.

They slowly, completely undress each other. And suddenly Charles can’t remember what he was thinking of last night: when their minds are entwined like this, this was surely meant to be, whatever else happens.

Erik has a delicious, serious look on his face as if he can’t believe it is him that is making this happen, and Charles has to bite down hard on his bottom lip as Erik, hands slick, reaches down.

Sex climaxes in fragmentations: terms of endearment cut off; _ohohohoh_ and quiet moans and ricocheting thoughts as they dock, shore, crash against each other. Erik facing him like this, inside his body and inside his mind at the same time, clouding out anyone else except the two of them, including the rest of Charles’s own thoughts; a power not even he can match. It can only be a transcendent moment, can only be.

*

In the future, there is Charles and there is Erik, and one day there will be peace.


End file.
